The role of separation-individuation experiences and personality in predicting externalizing and internalizing dimensions of functional impairment in a rural preadolescent and adolescent sample

Studied 4th- through 8th-grade students in a rural school district (N = 382, 201 girls; M age = 12.48) who, at the end of the academic year, completed self-report measures assessing functional impairment, self-concept, reactance, and autonomy experiences in relation to parents. Confirmatory factor analysis supported a distinction between 2 aspects of autonomy: mutuality (perceptions of parents as encouraging of autonomy) and conflictual dependence (negative representations of "self-in-relation-to-parent" and related feelings of anger and shame). Path analysis findings mostly were consistent with a mediated model predicting personality from autonomy experiences and functional impairment from personality. However, conflictual dependence rather than negative self-feelings directly predicted girls' emotional difficulties. Comparisons of total effects suggested that conflictual dependence may have stronger and more consistent implications for adolescent psychopathology than mutuality. In general, significant relations between conflictual dependence and psychopathology remained significant even after controlling for a measure of negative affectivity (NA).